Our reverence for beauty encodes a fantasy that reality is ordered and familiar, fully accessible to reason and observation. Philosopher Jane Forsey here argues that letting ugliness and disorder into our theories and aesthetic experiences means confronting the world’s strangeness and our irredeemable disconnection from it. And, Forsey argues, it also gives us better ways of understanding reality and intervening in it.

Consider the blobfish. Named the ugliest animal in the world by the Ugly Animal Preservation Society, it is safe to say that many people find the creature to be hideous. It is also safe to say that the appellation “ugly” is the result of an aesthetic judgement about the blobfish, or the product of an aesthetic experience of its features. Why then does philosophical aesthetics have such a difficult time incorporating experiences of the ugly, the horrific, the unpleasant, and the banal within the scope of its theories? Investigating this question has led me to consider the long tradition of my discipline that has made beauty, and with it aesthetic pleasure, the “default setting” for aesthetic theory at large. And I have sought an alternative way of considering what aesthetic experience amounts to, and how it can be expanded.

But first, beauty and pleasure. From the early Greek identification of beauty with truth and goodness, there has been a strong—if implicit—moral dimension at the heart of aesthetic theory. Beauty has been a call to order that has the power to console, heal, or reconcile us in an attempt to achieve harmony with the world and each other. It is in the contemplation of beauty that we are said to escape the horrors of the world and rise above them in a sort of pleasurable freedom—as though beauty shows us that we can be better selves, or offers us a glimpse of some kind of transcendence that we yearn for. But the history of aesthetics brings with it a superficial reassurance, a false tranquility, and an empty hope. Let us instead reconsider: freedom, as we have learned thanks to the Existentialists, can be disconcerting, even terrifying. The absurd is just around the corner. And these days, the idea of a transcendent order must surely be seen as little more than a fantasy.

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Clarity and familiarity may be pipe dreams that we need to overcome.

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I want to suggest that other-than-pleasurable experiences and judgements are not rare, problematic, or otherwise poor cousins to the beautiful and the pleasing: they, quite possibly, account for the majority of the aesthetic experiences of each of us, unless we have been extremely fortunate, or unless we have stopped our eyes and ears and refused to take in the greater part of our surroundings. But in aesthetic theory, the ugliness of a toad, the banality of an exhibit of insipid watercolours, the horror and pity of Picasso’s Guernica have been considered as either non-aesthetic (because only aesthetic properties and experiences produce the pleasures of beauty), or as included in the aesthetic domain merely as its negative image: deformed, degenerate and transgressive.